DCD34285-CD

Emily Howard: The Anvil

GLOBAL RELEASE DATE: 29 SEPTMBER 2023

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.

To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day?

A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope will survive.

Reviews will appear here following release date

Release Date: 29 September 2023
Catalogue No: DCD34285
Total playing time: 1:06:54

Recorded live on 7 July 2019 (The Anvil) & 29 October 2022 (Elliptics) at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

Producer: Tim Thorne (The Anvil), Matthew Bennett (Elliptics) Engineer: Stephen Rinker
24-bit digital editing: Stephen Rinker (The Anvil), Matthew Bennett (Elliptics)

24-bit digital mixing: Paul Baxter
(The Anvil), Matthew Bennett (Elliptics)
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Cover image: Getty Images / Manuel Streit
Concert photography: Joel Fildes Design: John Christ
Booklet editor: John Fallas

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com


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PREVIEW

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Album Booklet

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